Animal Rights Ideology Exposed in Butte Fire

The 64,728 acre Butte wildfire threatens to kill eight elephants, various lions, tigers, bears and numerous other animals at an animal rights owned compound in California. The Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) sanctuary in California is famous for their political animal rights ideology and utter lack of proper animal skills. The PAWS activists tirelessly advocate against the private ownership of elephants for everyone but themselves. Typical animal rights hypocrites. They are the driving force behind the recent California legislature vote to ban the elephant guide training tool. The bill, SB716, outlawing the use of the bull hook in the state is on Governor Brown’s desk waiting for his signature. The very tool that could save the PAWS elephants from potential death at this very moment is poised to be banned statewide.

PAWS likes to promote itself as being some sort of repository of rescued circus animals and other animals that have been abused by others but that’s just an act to get your money into their pockets. In the past several years PAWS activists forced the Toronto Zoo to send their three elephants to them even though the PAWS facility is infected with tuberculosis, and one of the three is now already dead. I covered the absolutely inhumane transport of those elephants in my recent book, The Art of Terror: Inside the Animal Rights Movement. A number of the elephants at PAWS are former zoo and circus animals. They are trained to allow humans to help them. Yet when tragedy happens, the incompetent workers of PAWS are potentially allowing animals to suffer and die. Their animal protection method is to use goats to graze on the brush around their facility, as if a herd of goats can possibly stop a 64,728 acre out of control monster wild fire. Only in the animal rights world would they think that such ludicrous protection would help them. But don’t worry, they have evacuated most of their human staff and left the animals behind to suffer.
Watch the ABC10 video of the PAWS facility in the raging fires path. An Asian elephant is clearly rocking in distress in a corral with nowhere to run and get away from the flames. An African elephant is confined in an even smaller space. This animal abuse tragedy didn’t need to happen. These elephants didn’t need to suffer like this. What about the tigers and other animals at PAWS? How much are they suffering? Will they die in the flames too?

The animal rights ideology that animals should never be trained or have any contact with humans means that they can’t safely load these elephants onto trucks and evacuate them because these activists just don’t know how. They lack the education, skills and experience to figure out how to move their elephants and other animals out of harm’s way. Any circus performer could and would immediately round up their elephants and truck them out of harm’s way. Their elephants are used to human contact, used to trusting humans to protect them from harm, used to being touched and handled. The animal rights ideology of PAWS means that these animals could potentially die in agony for no reason.

The world wide circus community, expert animal trainers, zoo workers, and other large animal owners have reached out to PAWS and offered their help to evacuate the animals only to be rebuffed. Under an animal rights world, PAWS supporters believe the animals are better off dead than helped by humans. Why isn’t the USDA getting involved and forcing PAWS to evacuate? Why is the USDA allowing this tragedy to happen? Is it because the USDA elephant “expert” Dr. Denise Sofranko has already been exposed in court as a animal rights ideologue who knows nothing about elephants? Think about that. The USDA’s top expert in elephants was exposed in court as an uneducated quack. Even if they survive, all of them are suffering from smoke inhalation and tremendous mental strain and distress. Over a 100 mile radius around them is under air quality alerts due to the heavy smoke and ash causing extremely poor air quality. As captive animals, they have no way of knowing or understanding why their human caretakers have abandoned them to die in a fierily holocaust. Will a left wing fruitcake ideology and a total lack of real animal skills result in endangered animals burning to death? Only time will tell what will happen to the animals at PAWS and whether or not Governor Brown signs the legislation to ban the very tool that could have saved them.Katharine Dokkenis a Public Affairs Specialist at The Cavalry Group and the author of a new book, The Art of Terror: Inside the Animal Rights Movement, available on Amazon.

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